Albert Clear, former Mallory Hat chief, dies at 88

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT), Robert Miller Staff Writer

Published 1:00 am, Friday, January 2, 2009

Albert Clear's father owned the marina on Candlewood Isle in New Fairfield. When Clear came back from overseas duty in World War II, his father offered him a job there, tending to the booming boat business on the lake.

He turned his father down.

"That wasn't what Bert wanted to do," his wife, Jeanne, said. "He wanted to make things."

And Albert Clear ran companies that did just that.

Clear was a vice president and plant manager of the old Mallory Hat Co. plant in the 1950s, when men would not consider themselves well dressed without a good fedora or homburg.

By the late 1950s it was obvious the once-booming industry was in decline, and Clear stepped away from it. After a few years as a business consultant, he took a job at the

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Stanley Works
in New Britain, rising to become its president and chief operating officer of its tool division before retiring in 1980.

When he died Dec. 28 at the Candlewood Lake cottage he returned to summer after summer, it was decades after the glory days of American manufacturing had shifted into an era of business consolidations, plant closings and outsourcing to lands of cheap labor.

That turn bothered Clear, said his son Gregory, 55, of South Dartmouth, Mass.

"He saw that moving things overseas had short-term benefits,"
Gregory Clear
said. "But he thought that it was important to add value to what you were doing. He also had a strong sense of social responsibility. He felt businesses should be contributing to their communities."

Clear was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1921. In the 1930s his parents moved to New Fairfield and Candlewood Isle, just about the same time his wife's parents -- she was
Jeanne Posselt
then -- bought a cottage on the isle as well. They met when he brought a sailboat to her home from his father's marina.

Clear went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then went into the
U.S. Army
to serve during World War II. He ended up as a captain in the Army's Air Corps -- today's
U.S. Air Force
-- doing work in ordinance supply that took him from the United States to England to North Africa, to the battle on Monte Cassino in Italy, and finally to France, where he set up munition supply depots for the forces of Gen.
George Patton
.

"He had a marvelous time," said Jeanne Clear. Like many WWII veterans, he returned to the U.S., took up his interrupted life, went to
Harvard Business School
, and did not dwell on his war years.

"He never talked much about that," Gregory Clear said.

Instead, Clear dedicated himself to becoming a good business executive. He was, above all things, "a professional," his son said. He began learning those skills in his years as manager of the Mallory Hat factory.

For example, Gregory Clear said, during the 1955 floods, when water began rising into the factory, an old hand came to him to report the cabinets holding the accounts receivable files were in danger of going under water. They rushed to move them to dry ground.

"He learned it's one thing to lose some hats, and another to lose the accounts receivable."

At the time, through the mid-'50s, there was still a market for men's hats.

"At that time, no man would be seen on the street without a hat," Jeanne Clear said. "And a right hat, not just a baseball cap."

Clear became president of the
Danbury Chamber of Commerce
during his Mallory years. He helped in the campaign to line Main Street with linden trees and helped dissuade some city leaders who thought I-84 should run right through the center of town.

"He'd read what Eisenhower wanted," Gregory said of the plans for the interstate highway system. "He knew that wouldn't be what would work."

In 1958, the
Stetson Hat Co.
, which owned Mallory, wanted Clear to move to its Philadelphia headquarters. With his family -- Jeanne, Gregory and Geoffrey -- settled in Newtown, Clear declined the offer, in part because he didn't want to live in Philadelphia and in part because hatting wasn't what it used to be.

Instead, Clear worked for several years as a consultant with the firm of
Booz Allen
and Hamilton in New York City before returning to manufacturing at The Stanley Works. The family moved to West Hartford, but kept the two Posselt family summer cottages on Candlewood Isle.

The family still has the cottages. During summers, the serious-minded Albert Clear -- good businessman, good father and husband -- would get away from the world on his sailboat.

"I have a motor boat, so we'd have these stinkpot vs. sailboat arguments," Gregory Clear said. Even into his mid-80s, his father would swim out to scrub the water line off his boat.

After retiring from Stanley, Clear still served on the boards of many corporations. He and Jeanne traveled extensively. He fussed over his lawns.

But eventually, he began suffering from vascular dementia.

"He had no trouble remembering things in the past," Jeanne Clear said. "It was recent things that gave him trouble."

A broken hip put him in Glen Hill nursing home. But he was back at Candlewood Isle for Christmas, happy and aware of his surroundings and his family.